Migrating dmd to D?

[Thomas Koch]

> Walter and I have had a long conversation about the next radical thing
> to do to improve D's standing. Like others in this community, we believe
> it's a good time to consider bootstrapping the compiler. Having the D
> compiler written in D has quite a few advantages, among which taking
> advantages of D's features and having a large codebase that would be its
> own test harness.

Two points from the viewpoint of the Debian distribution:

Debian is ported to many different platforms and in average one new platform 
port started every year. A huge pain point for porters are circular (or 
self) dependencies. A lot of effort goes into breaking such circles.

So in the moment the D language is great in that it does not introduce a new 
circular dependency. It would be a pity to lose this.

The second important thing for Debian (and Fedora and others) is licensing. 
It's a pity that DMD isn't free software and I believe DMD not being in 
distros is one reason for the low popularity of D. It's hard to learn D with 
gdc while all tutorials are based on DMD.

So instead of a rewrite of D, it would rather be important (from my humble 
point of view) to replace non-free parts of DMD.

Thank you, Thomas Koch